ONSITE VS. OFFSITE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

ONSITE VS. OFFSITE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Onsite SEO involves making sure your website pages, titles, tags, content and overall structure are optimized for your target keywords. You also need to make sure that you have a significant of inbound links from highly respected external websites – that’s called Offsite SEO.

You need to have both to be successful, and finding the right mix has everything to do with analytics and tracking.

Keep in mind that you MUST be using the right keywords or run the risk of spending time and money driving the wrong people to your website. This is a big mistake a lot of clients make before we start working with them. They are optimizing their sites based on the keywords they think people are using, not the keywords people are actually searching. That’s a big mistake.

It’s not hard to do a little research and find out exactly how your prospects are searching for businesses like yours. Google offers some rudimentary keyword research tools but for more robust solutions you need to turn to a marketing software solution like Hubspot or Marketo.

Onsite SEO

After you know what your keywords should be, you can get started applying your keyword research to your SEO efforts. Onsite SEO is fairly straightforward. After you’ve identified the most relevant keywords for each page of your site and weighted search volume vs. competition/difficulty, it’s time to start crafting your content around those keywords.

You have to make sure that you are using the keywords appropriately all throughout the copy on your website. It’s also important to use those keywords in the headlines and titles on each of those pages. Don’t forget to use your target keywords in the meta tags, meta descriptions, image tags and actual URLs for those pages.

Once that initial onsite SEO work is completed, there is very little you can do to further optimize your website beyond revisiting and adjusting your keyword strategy on a regular basis. In the meantime, you have to sit back and wait for Google, Yahoo, and Bing to index your site. You can proactively push a sitemap to Google and request indexing (which we do for our clients) but reindexing may take up to 3 months.

One way to improve rankings with onsite SEO is to add more pages to your site. This is where blogging comes into play. Every time you publish a new blog post, you are giving your site an new indexable and searchable page. It’s relatively easy to add a blog post, on, say, onsite and offsite search engine optimization.

Most important onsite SEO elements

Onsite SEO is not hard to get right. There are a number of things you can check and fix and a few mistakes to avoid to ensure that everything is setup in the way it should be. The most important on-page SEO elements are:

Your page titles and descriptions – If you are into SEO, you must have read this a million times and this is because it is one of the most important SEO factors. The page title and description is what the search engines ‘read’ first when crawling a page.

If your titles and descriptions are not optimized in the way search engine crawlers want, you are making their task more difficult and this is not working in your favour.

How do you optimize your titles and descriptions?

The rules are simple, keep the title close to 60 characters and the description to no more than 150 characters. Avoid keyword stuffing i.e. adding keywords in the titles or descriptions that don’t make sense, but do try to give search engines and users a good idea on what the page is about.

A good approach when optimizing these is to come up with titles and descriptions that are catchy and encourage users to click but at the same time making sure that they are related to what people may search (that is relevant to the content of the page).

There are many tools to help you optimize your titles, I use semrush most of the times and the process is the following:

Think of search queries users may use to find your page

Pass those queries through Google, Semrush, google keyword tool to find out the search volume, keyword difficulty and what others are using as titles for those queries.

Identify which keywords (preferably long tail keywords) are appropriate for your page

Try to include those keywords in your titles while at the same time giving the title a friendlier and interesting tone.

For example:

Search Phrase: ‘benefits of bananas’

Keyword (after research): ‘banana health benefits’

Title: ‘10 Amazing health benefits from eating bananas daily’

Description: ‘Eating bananas on a daily basis offers a number of health benefits. Number 3 is amazing and will definitely surprise you! Read on to find out how.’

The H1 Tag: A well-optimized page should have only one H1 tag and several h2,h3 tags. The h1 tag is usually the same as the page title (although it doesn’t have to be exactly the same).

A quick way to find out if your page follows this rule is to right click anywhere on your page and select VIEW SOURCE from the pop-up menu. Then click CTRL-F to open the ‘Find’ box and search for H1. if you see more than two instances of <h1> and </h1> then ask your developer to fix it so that the page has only one H1 tag.

ALT text for images: If you use images within your text (and you should), you need to make sure that the ALT text has a meaningful value that will give a good indication to search engines about the content of the image and how this is related to your page.

For example for the image below, I have set the ALT text to ‘onsite SEO principles’.

Internal links: I am perhaps the biggest fan of internal links and this is because:

They enhance the user experience

They are ‘safe’ to use

They help search engines discover more pages from your website

They help you create content that is strongly inter-related

They reduce a website’s bounce rate

They help you ‘lead’ readers to the most important pages of your website.

You can read my previous post on internal linking best practices for more details but as a rule of thumb when you do your onsite SEO review, make sure that your pages have internal links that are useful for the users to see and click.

Accessibility: None of the above techniques would be useful if search engines cannot access your website. This is SEO 101 but you need to make sure that you are not accidentally blocking crawlers from accessing your pages.

The best way to find out if you have an issue with accessibility is to register your website with Google search console and run the ‘Fetch and Render’ option from ‘Fetch as Google’ under ‘Crawl’.

By doing this test, Google will tell you if there is something that prevents them from indexing your website properly. In addition, you can also use the ‘robots.txt’ tester under ‘Crawl’ to make sure that everything is ok.

Content: I cannot stress enough the importance of high quality, interesting and unique content in the whole SEO process. If you don’t have content that has these characteristics there is no point in dealing with on-page or off page SEO.

I will not go into many details here about content, you can read my post about evergreen content to learn how to craft content that ranks well and also this post which explains how long to make your articles.

What you need to have always in mind when working with websites and digital marketing is that content always has to come first and then everything else.

Other onsite SEO factors:

Besides the above, other SEO factors to consider when doing onsite optimization are:

Well formatted URLs (words separated by ‘-’)

Proper use of breadcrumbs

Use of structured data

Website Speed

Mobile friendliness

Transparency (who wrote the post)

Broken links

Properly configured 404 pages

For a full list of SEO factors, take a look at my SEO Checklist.

Offsite SEO

Offsite SEO is a little trickier and also requires an ongoing effort. The major search engines are all looking for other sites that link back to your site as an indicator of good content.

If a lot of sites want to link to your site, then you must have good content. At least that’s what they think. This has been the source of many black-hat SEO tactics in the past.

So, if CNN.com and CBSmarketwatch.com think your site is worth linking to, then the search engines give that high marks.

There are at least two great ways to generate real, quality backlinks from respectable sites. The first is to do regular press releases. Once those releases are search engine optimized and have relevant links in the releases back to pages on your website, you should distribute them via an electronic wire service. Sites like Business Wire and PR Newswire will share your press release with all major (and minor) news outlets, all of which have website versions and post content like yours on a regular basis. This immediately generates highly respected links back to your site, thus improving your offsite SEO.

Another way to create quality inbound links and improve offsite SEO is to guest blog. This requires you to reach out to blogs that your prospects are already reading. Not sure which these blogs are? Go to Google and type in “guest blogs” and your “industry”. The result will be a number of blog links for your prospects. If you’re going to leverage this tactic, be sure to always post only truly useful, truly compelling, truly unique content.

Now, start reaching out to those editors and offer to write a regular blog post. Most of the editors are thrilled to have industry experts contributing to their blogs. After all, if other people are writing posts that means they don’t have to…You are actually doing them a favor! So it’s not hard to become a guest blogger. Just make sure that your guest blog posts include links back to your site. Do this regularly and you will have an aggressive offsite SEO program that drives traffic to your website.

Off-Site SEO refers to actions you can take to promote your website on the web (besides advertising). The most commonly used methods are:

Links pointing to your website from other websites.

Social media marketing.

Link Building: When a user is typing a query in the search box (of search engines), they have to decide which websites to show in the first positions of the SERPS and the order they will show them.

To be able to do that in a way that will keep their users happy about the results, they use a number of factors (Google is using more than 255 ranking factors) in their ranking algorithms.

The algorithms are influenced (either positively or negatively) by links pointing to a website. If the links are coming from trusted and related websites, they are considered as a ‘vote of trust’ and they can help a website rank higher. If on the other hand if they are coming from low-quality websites, they can lower the rankings of the particular website or even get it into trouble (think Google penalties).

Want to improve your SEO but do not know where to start? Stop Guessing! Read my proven SEO and link building advice and boost your traffic and rankings.

Over the years there has been a lot of discussion in the SEO community about natural vs unnatural links, practices that are ‘allowed’ and practices that are considered as a black hat but many people still have questions on how to approach this process.

To understand how to use link building correctly, you need to know what Google is saying about links. In summary, Google considers any type of link that was generated for the intention of manipulating their algorithm as unnatural. A lot of unnatural links will eventually lead to a penalty.

This means that you should not buy, sell, exchange or ask for links for the purpose of increasing your rankings.

What can you safely do?

Don’t get into the habit of building links (especially from low-quality sites) but go after natural links. Natural links are given to you by other websites because they found your content and website interesting and worth linking.

This may sound weird but it does work much better than spending time and effort to build links that may get you into trouble.

Read how my blog traffic increased to 400K per month without doing any link building; this is just one of the examples I can share of my own websites or client websites that rank high and get a lot of Google traffic without doing any sort of link building.

You do need links, don’t get me wrong, but you can get them naturally if you have good content and if you can successfully put your content in front of many people. What is the best way to do this? Through content marketing, solid promotion tactics, careful guest posting, and social media marketing.

Content marketing can help you publish the right content and good promotion techniques can get your content in front of the right people.

Guest posting on sites that matter and have a high Google trust can give you more benefits than building tens of low-quality links.

Social Media Marketing: Social media marketing is the fastest way to promote your content to people that may show an interest. It’s not always easy to do, you need a plan and you may have to spend some money but it works and it is safe and solid.

I will explain in more details in an upcoming article how to get natural links using the above methods, for the purpose of this post it is important to understand how off-page SEO works and the difference it has with onsite SEO.

Onsite VS Offsite SEO. Which one do you need?

As explained above you need both. Your first concern is to get your on-page SEO correct so that search engines can understand your content and then when you have enough quality content published on your website you can start thinking about off page SEO and how to get strong natural links from other websites that will further boost your rankings.

Don’t start the other way around, if a website doesn’t have all those characteristics to be considered a great website, then it’s not a good candidate for natural links which is another signal to Google that any links pointing to the site are the result of practices that violate their guidelines.

Want to uncover more secrets to unlock the lead generation potential of inbound marketing?

Start Today Tip– The first step to any good SEO effort is keyword research. Make sure you are using the right keywords to reach your target audience. Next, take a look at how your site is built. Do you have content built around your primary target keywords? Did your webmaster use the right tags and descriptions when setting up each page? If not, don’t worry…this is a relatively easy fix.

Once you’ve taken a close look at your onsite SEO efforts, start an offsite SEO plan. Identify key blogs in your industry and reach out to the editors. Next, create a press release, add links into the release and use one of the wire services to get the release out there. Establish thought leadership and secure guest blogging opportunities on websites where your prospects spend their time. Watch your traffic climb. Do this regularly and you will see your website traffic increase. Then it’s just a matter of time before the leads follow.